Historians Debate The subject of slavery and its function as a - TopicsExpress

Historians Debate The subject of slavery and its function as a labor system has been of great interest in recent years, particularly as changing social currents shifted attention to American race relations and the historical background of those relationships. The first scholar to give American slavery serious attention was Ulrich B. Phillips writing at the beginning of the twentieth century. In American Negro Slavery (1918) and Life and Labor in the Old South (1929), along with numerous articles and edited works, he gave extended treatment to the organization and regulation of plantation labor. As a southern defender of white supremacy, however, he gave relatively little attention to the slave except as a passive object of white direction. He viewed slavery in a paternalistic fashion, minimizing violence and stressing harmony between master and slave. He viewed African Americans as inferior, lacking in initiative, and unable to care for themselves, characteristics that suited them for the toil of slavery and inclined them to accept their master’s leadership. In his view, slavery was a social relationship rather than an economic one; indeed, he regarded slavery as an uneconomic drag on the South, partly because of the slave’s slothfulness and inefficiency, and as a way to rescue benighted trolls from primitive backwardness. Because he saw only torpor, docility and dim-wittedness among the slaves, his admission of give-and-take in the master-slave relationship was a function of the planter’s paternal outlook rather than of the slave’s assertiveness and self-awareness, and the presence of a few slaves with ability did not soften his general view of slavery was as a way to regulate race relations and to control an indolent and child-like people. Although imprisoned within the racialist notions of the early twentieth century, he nevertheless set the parameters of subsequent scholarship. A changing social climate led to a reconsideration of the picture sketched by Phillips. One consequence of the Second World War was a post-war discrediting of racism and a rejection of the assumption that black people enslaved on American plantations were innately inferior. Operating within Phillips’ framework but rejecting his racial assumptions, Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution (1956) viewed slavery as a repressive institution that required extreme physical coercion to oblige other humans to unrequited toil. Black people were no less intelligent or capable than white people, inclined towards rebelliousness in situations of apparent injustice, and requiring superior force to compel their submission. Where Phillips found paternal compassion, Stampp uncovered brutal exploitation. Slavery was an economic system and existed because people made money from it but it was not the most efficacious way to manage labor and the South suffered because of it. Economic historians Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, sharing Stampp’s social attitudes, disagreed with his economic argument. In Time On The Cross (1974), they took issue with the notion that slavery was uneconomic and slave laborers inefficient. Comparing output per worker they found the slaves’ exceeded that of northern free laborers and that slavery was a spur to southern agriculture and a rational choice for southern planters. Indeed, they argued that slavery surpassed in efficiency by a considerable margin the northern practice of family farming. They credited the enslaved for much of this success. Rather than incompetent dolts (an assessment they considered racist even among those who rejected racialist assumptions), they saw workers who absorbed the Protestant ethic and responded to incentives rather than punishments to impel an expanding southern economy. They adduced an econometric model they viewed as “scientific” and as providing the basis for a more objective account than previous studies of slave labor. But their findings, highly publicized, were also highly controversial and perhaps were most effectively refuted in an essay by Herbert Gutman and Richard Sutch in “Sambo Makes Good, or Were Slaves Imbued with the Protestant Work Ethic” (in Paul A. David et al., Reckoning with Slavery: A Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery [1976]). Gutman and Sutch charged that Fogel and Engerman paid more attention to their model than to the evidence and that much of their data were unrepresentative. They particularly ridiculed the diminished role of compulsion in Fogel and Engerman’s model because, among other reasons, it seemed to suggest that slaves embraced their condition: that slavery was a career choice rather than forced labor. The issue of accommodation and the nature of the relationship between master and slave was a big part of Eugene Genovese’s work. In Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1972) he used a paternalist model, which he was careful to assert did not mean gentle or genial, to show an organic relationship as existing between the planters and their laborers. Within this framework he was able to write with particular sensitivity about the complex mixture of discord and affection that governed work in the Big House and the constant tension surrounding drivers and other bondsmen in authority, caught as they were between the apparent source of their power and a freighted responsibility to their community. But the most original advance in looking at slave labor was made by Peter Wood’s Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974) because it shifted focus to the colonial period and to the lower South, which had largely been neglected and where slaves had a much stronger influence than historians had previously considered. Not only did his work expand the range of activities that engaged the enslaved, but he regarded their African background as contributing to their talents and usefulness. His work set the stage for an entirely new look at slave labor and has, in one way or another, influenced much of what has come since. To sample more recent studies that consider slave labor and its economic and social consequences look at Ira Berlin, “Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on British Mainland North America,” American Historical Review 85 (1980), and S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (2006).